What: In development for nearly 10 years, and an ASF Top-Level Project since 2003, Apache Maven is the build system of choice for millions of developers and thousands of organizations world-wide.

Why: Maven 3 represents the culmination of nearly two years of work re-architecting the internals of the system based on experience gained over the last five years with Maven 2.x. Maven 3 is faster, more reliable, and more extensible, with users already reporting 10-40% improvements in build time over Maven 2.

"A key priority for our users was backward compatibility," said Brian Fox, Vice President of Apache Maven. "We've invested a significant amount of time and effort to ensure a smooth transition while maintaining backward compatibility with Maven 2 builds and plugins."

Highlights of the release include:

Parallel build capability

Conversion of IoC system from Plexus to Guice, including a Plexus compatibility layer

Rewritten dependency resolution logic, designed to be extensible and embedded in other applications

Improved POM validation during the build to warn users of potential problems

Improved error handling and messages

Decoupled reporting engine from the core

New inheritance and interpolation code designed to be extensible and allow composition of POMs in future releases